


advanced existential geometry

by clytemnestras



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Frottage, In Media Res, Miscommunication, Multi, Oral Sex, Pining, Polyamory, Porn with Feelings, Season/Series 03, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 18:43:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7652557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Watch enough How It's Made and you’ll learn that the triangle is the strongest shape there is. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	advanced existential geometry

**Author's Note:**

> roughly 2k of composed on a phone observation/miscommunication followed by 2k of composed on a phone porn to cheer myself up
> 
> unbeta'd, not proofread: you have been warned

It's almost easier to watch it like this, when there's a warm body on either side and no chance of script deviation. Annie’s left hand is holding his right in a tight, assured way but Troy’s in his left is more comfortable warmth.

It's difficult to accurately compare the two.

The warm, quiet cove of blanket fort is safe enough, and the light through the blankets have always leaked through in a way that's dreamlike; he can drift here, into sleep or elsewhere, two hands holding him together.

The paused shot on the laptop screen is ambiguous, anonymous, a half a smile cascaded by hair, chin resting on another person’s shoulder. He thinks if he tugs just enough on Annie's hand he can recreate it, but that seems redactive. He likes that it could be anyone, in this small moment, everyone of them as voyeuristic as him.

Troy is wearing the same shirt, and it doesn't ruin the illusion. Not a bit.

“You wanna press play?” Annie leans in close so she’s pressing against his side and he can see from the corner of his eye that Troy twists to see them fit together, adjusting himself so he’s leaning closer than he needs to.

“No,” Abed says. “Give it a minute.”

*

Annie is smiling in a quiet way over the kitchen counter, sighing almost prettily as Troy eases passed her, hands briefly glancing at her waist as he does it. The shape of it is nice in a way Abed can't articulate but can visualise, the way one small touch and relaxed recipience _tends_ to make words redundant.

He wants to film it, the smallness of it, how Troy's hands hardly need a second’s contact and still curl around Annie like they're used to the space she fills and how Annie doesn't even tilt her head up to see, just exhales and has her spine turn soft, straightening the second he passes. Instead he writes it out in his mind, a stock check of the image, and eats a spoonful of cereal.

He says, “You ever have dreams that are like. Hyper-real, more real than reality, so mundane that when you go to, say, eat cereal, or walk down your own street after it blurs with the dream? Almost like you can't tell if you're awake or not.”

Annie frowns. “Abed, do we need to call someone?”

Troy leans forward a little, arm stretching out in a _stop_ motion that touches her belly, brushing the little patch of skin revealed where her sleepshirt lifts. “No, no, I know what he means.” Troy’s looking at Abed, not where his fingers are lightly stroking Annie's skin. It's too genuine.

Abed watches carefully the moment Annie sighs and Troy catches himself, eyes going wide and hand pausing, splayed out like It's burning and he's too stunned to pull away.

Annie coughs and the moment ends, Troy snatching his hand back and rubbing his neck. “I had one like that a while back.”

“Yeah?” Abed is asking Troy but watching Annie, gliding slowly away from Troy and toward Abed. “What happened?”

Annie is a shadow at his side, taking in her warmth, her pyjama shorts, the way her fingers are there at on his arm, again without thought.

“Nothing.” Troy pours a glass half full of nesquick powder and tops it up with milk, shuddering as he drinks it. His eyes go wide, one twitching. “ _Mm_ ,” he says, draining the glass and sputtering. “Yummy.”

*

She's wearing his vest. Or, not his vest. Han's vest. Starburns’ vest.

It's the two of them in that false moment, Han and the rebel princess painted against the backdrop like set pieces or panels in a comic book. She's pulling him forward by the collar of his shirt and kissing him, his arms scrabbling at her back and her tongue in his mouth.

He hears that thing, the _I love you / I know_ from somewhere far, but it's not her voice, not them, not anything that makes sense.

Waking up isn't really a shock, but he can't say he'd been dreaming at all that time. Not too real, just crazy enough to be true.

*

Watch enough _How It's Made_ and you’ll learn that the triangle is the strongest shape there is. It's an infrastructure thing, apparently, but in the end it just gives them ideas.

Troy falls asleep on him the night they marathon it on DMAX, collapsed atop him in one chair after reenacting a transformers sequence that became too comfortable.

It seemed like a fair question - if this is strong, how do we use it, where does its value come from? And the answer, like it is to so many questions, was badass alien robots.

Troy is a more vulnerable thing now, curled up in a half crescent along Abed's body. He snuggles close into Abed's throat, and Abed’s hand ends up just resting there, stroking occasionally. It's easy to covet these moments, casual closeness almost foreign.

It kills the metaphor pretty stone dead - that this triangle makes them stronger, harder to break, harder than human bodies built to collapse like they do in sloppy storylines from rehashed Archie comics. What they are here is soft, semi-circular.

It's possible that means incomplete. (It's possible that means two fit and one is surplus.)

Troy mumbles into Abed's collarbone and presses a kiss there, suddenly, blinking up at Abed.

He can feel the tense wave run through Troy, and he keeps stroking his hair, smiling just slightly until Troy relaxes again.

He goes to say something - or, his mouth opens in an 'O’ that makes him question the shape metaphor further, but Troy exhales against his skin in a way that makes him shudder and nothing is worth losing the moment.

If he evaluates it, it will come

*

Sometimes when Abed wakes up in the morning and Troy is still passed out, there's a dangerous quiet to the apartment he's frightened only he feels. It's every scene in every horror movie cast down a silent corridor, abandoned but for one red shirt, distrustful but still ultimately doomed.

He would hate that his pyjama shirt was red had he not picked it specially. It's sitcom psych one-oh-one; to conquer a fear you have to face it, feel it, and fucking destroy it.

As a kid he'd fall asleep with the tv on so he'd never need to wake up to the sound of his own pulse over nothingness; it's pretty much always unnerving, and even now he'd feel better could he hear some mediocre nineties rerun or another easing through the apartment. The tv, though, is outside in the badlands and it's hard to say what's worse, the illusion of outside or the danger of quiet.

He swallows down, straightens his back and peels back the blanket.

It's when scanning the space, left, right then down - he finds the cereal bowl, one glass of apple juice beside it. There's a post-it on the glass.

_I tried making special drink and it was gross. It's in the cereal - A_

Abed smiles and picks up the bowl, sniffing as he walks. He goes into the living room to switch on the tv and takes a bite of cereal as he sinks into his chair.

He frowns. “That is. Not good.”

He takes another bite anyway.

*

Abed spends too long studying the situation, growing closer and less impartial - somehow less _informed_ as he does.

He watches _The Doom Generation_ , which has pretty much everything you want in movie: graphic nudity, surrealist violence and gratuitous cameos that date painfully with every passing year. It's stunning in a few ways. Abed is left feeling hollow, after, aware of a surface layer caked with crazy awesome and thin allegories on church and state; switch off before the downer ending and it's easy to pretend there's some a good omen for what's to come.

 _Chasing Amy_ is valid social commentary and sparse, one of the better Kevin Smith movies but basically resolves nothing other than _don't be Ben Affleck,_ and he was pretty solid on that before.

 _Threesome_ is both depressing and too on the nose. It's pretty much the closest to the truth, and is pretty much a disaster; sloppy, awkward and a kind of a downer. At least _Pretty In Pink_ wasn't so righteous about it.

He stays up for three nights analysing those movies, walking the apartment with shaky, sleepless limbs and curling back up in his chair, eyes sore.

Annie worries.

He can feel it over his shoulder, her rigid spine and lilting _ums_ and _ahs_ that stretch out longer until they snap her. She glides over to him with melody in her voice and forced shine in her eyes, as if they're playing Disney Princess again. It's down to how she flicks back her shiny hair and perches on the arm of his chair, resting her cheek on his shoulder.

When she whispers that Troy has burrowed into the fort, sulking - in vile-smelling pyjamas, she adds, looking Abed up and down, eyes sharp and heavy along his body - about being left out of ‘crazy movie sinkhole time’, Abed lets her pull him up from the chair and into the fort. Troy hug-tackles Abed to the pillow-lined floor and doesn't let him up, even as they grow drowsier.

“Annie,” Troy says it, one arm across Abed’s chest, watching where she’s dallying at the very edge of the blankets. “Thanks.”

She hesitates, Abed watches her chest lean in, feet misstep, and then she leaves, smiling but subdued in a way he doesn't trust.

*

“It was about brownies,” Troy says one evening, cutting himself a slice of dorito lasagna and licking the sauce off the knife.

“You know the telepathic vortex doesn't work unless we're in character, right?” Abed doesn't like the quiet way he said it, or how Annie looked over at them and slowly turned the volume down on the tv.

“I meant before, when you said about the dream thing.” Troy's voice goes a little high on the end of the word and he studies his food in a way Shirley would call furious. He stabs at a tomato-soaked gummi worm. “Mine was about eating brownies.”

Abed wants to - he wants more than makes sense. If he’s just observing, his hands won't slip, he won’t make his homemade house crumble around him. “Cool,” he hears himself say, in a dated, absent kind of way. “Cool cool cool.”

“It was like.” Troy twists the gummi worm around his fork like spaghetti and chews on it like Britta does her nicotine gum. “I could smell something so delicious, like homemade, apology food delicious.” A light spray of sauce flies across the kitchen from the almost brutal way Troy is eating. “So I come out of bed and find this huge tray of brownies just on the counter going cold, so _obviously_ I rush over there to stake my ownership. Like I could almost taste these things, that's how real they were.” He looks into his plate and shoves his lasagne around. “Then I saw you and Annie _having sex_ and I woke up.”

Annie gasps like it's been shocked out of her. Troy laughs like he’s heaving.

Abed says, “are you worried about that?”

“ _No._ ”

“Then why would you imagine it so vividly?”  Someone has to break first, someone has to say the things he doesn't know how to, even if it's all an accident.

Annie gets up.

“Abed, I think we should. Um. _Not_ talk about this whilst Troy looks like he might pass out.” Her voice is in baby-mode, a soothing thing, or a patronising one. It's genuine, though, so he guesses it could be both.

“But I need -”

“Right,” Troy looks at him, steps a little too close. “You need a lot, huh, buddy?” Troy isn't smiling, and there's a weight to the moment, and Abed _knows_ this scene, has played it with countless pretty girls looking up with spotlights in their eyes. Except Abed is in _this_ moment, looking up with wonder and fear, knowing what's right there waiting on the edge of his tongue.

Troy leans in just a touch, just enough that their lips almost brush but don't press together, then he breathes in hard.

Annie's gaze is not impartial or inconsequential and he could touch it, maybe, if he leant back and reached out -

Troy leans back and picks up his plate, shoulders up like barriers, football padding. “I'm gonna go eat this in private. Like a man.”

Abed touches his arm, this meaningless movement from terrible romances he doesn't trust but tries anyway. Troy shrugs him off.

He leaves the room quietly, Abed and Annie slowly coming together on axis or collision course.

She covers him with her, wraps her arms around his shoulders or as much of them she can reach and they kind of collapse together onto the kitchen counter.

“I think,” he says, trying to lean down onto her small body, arms twisted together like they might have just fallen that way, “this might be the problem.”

She tucks her hair behind her ear, then repeats the movement on him.

*

Troy crawls on top of him when Abed creeps into bed. He presses himself all along Abed's body, arms braced on either side of Abed's head. They are closed in by the dark and by the blankets, a secret space defying the reality they’re floundering in.

“Inspector,” Troy isn't even using Reggie's voice but he’s close and he smells like Axe and Old Spice mixed together, toothpaste dotted like a tiny indicator on his lower lip. “This planet is done for. And I don't think either one of us is willing to die with regrets.”

There's no intensity here. Or, there's the kind that makes Abed's whole body arch up, practiced but uncontrolled. Troy's mouth is right there, soft and parted, and they take the step, the breath, together.

*

It's the right kind of evening for them to crawl into the fort together, pushed closer by the ambience of lamplight and plush throw pillows. There are two main things Abed gains from this: set design is an area more deserving of his praise, and spotlights should make summer unbearable - but sometimes magical things come out of dire situations, like Annie and Troy both stripping down to vests and underwear.

They sit together rather than surrounding him, Annie pliant against Troy's front where they tangle on the floor and it's so easy to slowly migrate there, curl himself up against Troy's side, his arm rubbing against Annie's thigh when they shift and this is doomed, god it's completely doomed.

Annie looks at him and smiles, stretching so her vest strap slips down and her bra pokes through, and there's still all the miles of milky skin from her legs exposed. Troy runs his hand down her left leg until he gets to Abed's arm and waggles his eyebrows.

He can't remember what movie they're watching, just how Annie sighs up against Troy's mouth, suddenly, like after all this it's still a surprise, and how Troy cups his hands around her face, thumbs stroking her cheekbones.

He looks at them both and keeps his hands touching them, connected in thoughts and in skin like his body is a catalyst charging the moment. It's a dream. They are all a dream.

Annie leans back for a shallow breath and smiles lazily, all flushed pink. “Is this what you want?”

Troy's face falls into her throat, breathing in the smell there, tasting it with quick passes of his mouth and Abed feels himself shiver.

“Is it what _you_ want?”

He strokes high up on her thigh, let's his cheek brush all up Troy's arm like he can swallow their sensations.

Troy whips around sharply, eye's wide, hands stilling along the skin of Annie’s stomach. “Oh my _god,_ yes. We want this. Now take off your shirt, please, you're making me feel hot in the bad way.”

Abed kisses Troy's shoulder and pulls of his shirt.

They quickly, quietly divest each other of clothing. Abed leans over Annie so she's almost pressed into the pillows under him and draws his fingers along the hem of her vest until she wriggles under him, eyes blazing. “Off!”

“You want me to get off you? That's not really the orgy spirit.” His lip quirks; it's not a character, just a stolen dose of charm, the kind he knows makes her shiver and curl herself closer to him.

“Don't be cute,” steel drips a little through her voice, playing back. Vitriol is sexy, it's the Beatrice and Benedick principle, it means like is starving for like.

He kisses her hard, breathes her all the way in. Her arms are twisting around his neck so she can get better leverage, pushing up into his body so their ribs can touch, her tongue teasing the seam of his lips. High-pitched and ridiculous, something whines in the back of his throat and is swallowed down by her.

Troy plasters himself along Abed's back and hooks his fingers into his boxers, easing them down as Abed eases Annie's vest up, breaking the kiss to lift it over her head.

“Okay,” he looks at them both, swollen lipped, naked. “Let's do this.”

They tumble together, all three of them. Abed has his hands all over Troy, dragging his fingers all across his hips and chest. He feels the moment Troy goes breathless, watching Annie above them like some deity as her hair tumbles in waves over her bare breasts.

Troy arches up to touch her, one hand molding to her left breast, his mouth finding the other. Abed follows Troy’s movement, his hands dipping lower, fingers tracing the defined muscles at his thighs, the way they dip and change around his hips. Annie gasps, melts back against the floor as Troy uses his mouth and hands to map her out.

Abed's gaze keeps wandering over Troy's shoulder to watch how Annie shivers, how Troy's mouth looks as he tugs at her dusky nipples and then moves down along her ribs and her bellybutton, the whole area fluttering. It's insane.

His fingers are digging into Troy's hips, the left hand always teasing closer to the apex of his thighs and the right wandering back. He draws one finger down the crack of Troy's ass, a teasing, testing movement. Troy shoots up with a strangled sound that burrows deep inside Abed's chest.

“Again,” Troy says, “Dude, please.”

Annie nods, fingers twisted in a corner of blanket, two of Troy's fingers curled up inside her, thumb pressing at her clit. She keeps making these stunned, short little sounds when Troy moves. He wonders if she's ever felt this with someone else, with anyone who looked up at her like they are now.

There's so much. So, so much.

Abed’s fingers glance at Troy's asshole and Troy shudders, easing down onto the pillows, his mouth level with Annie's glistening sex. They all could melt on this. It's warm and close and Abed's body moves on instinct to fit against Troy's, his hips flush against Troy's ass.

“Is this good?” He can't tell. They twist and arch but he can't read it, needs their sounds when there's no shot for shot comparison and the crease between eyebrows could be frustration or concentration.

“God,” Annie says, arching all the way up so their eyes are level when Troy's mouth presses hot kisses against her cunt. “Yes, it's stupidly, crazy good.”

Troy hums and it runs all the way through Annie and Abed's hips keep moving, grinding against Troy like he, too, is trapped by the wave slinking through them.

They look like porn. They look like art. His chest does this tiny shift at the sight.

“Can I film you?”

Annie freezes. Troy goes stiff against him but Abed can feel from the hand loosely wrapped around it that his cock jerks at the thought.

“ _Abed._ ”

It seems like the right thing to do, to lean down over Troy - pressing himself harder, firmer, grinding in, the head of his cock slipping between Troy's cheeks - and touch her hand, to grip it hard in his own. “Not now,” he says, “not this. But you two. I want you, and I want to see you, in more ways that one.”

“Oh,” Annie's eyes go soft then wide. “ _Ah_ , oh. Wow.”  Her fingernails bite hard into his hand as she grinds back down against Troy, his tongue hot against her, three fingers twisted inside.

Troy moves back against him impatiently, bucking up into his fist and he tightens it. He keeps rubbing his hips in the rhythm of Troy's gasps, the same pace he can hear sometimes when he pretends to be sleeping, one eye fluttering open to catch the movement under sheets. “Oh my God come _on_ I think I might be dying of sexy right now.”

Annie laughs but it cuts off like something strangled, twisting herself up into these crazy shapes that Abed wants rotoscoped.

All three of them caught and Abed wants so much, his fingers and Annie's fingers both too tight and her gasps in his ear when he pushes harder with his hips, cock twitching. Troy’s back arches so deep that his head falls back and Abed can see all Annie's wetness across his mouth and he pulls Troy back against him to kiss it away, take it into himself.

Annie makes this _sound_ that tears out of her and quakes through the space, that makes them drag away from one another's mouths. One of her hands is rubbing furiously above where Troy’s fingers are buried deep and she comes apart there under them, her fingernails close to drawing blood in Abed's hand.

Troy eases away from her and sinks back, twisting so he and Abed are face to face, some singular thing with their heads tilted close and mouths near to touching. Abed glances over to see where that leaves Annie; still twitching, still watching, still holding one of Abed's hands.

“Go on,” she says. “Show me.”

Abed whips round when he feels Troy's hands on him, on them both, rocking their hips together. He’s close, has maybe been close since they started, since this was all just some sense from the snapshots he’s been compiling in his head.

Troy’s forehead is touching his and there's this weird moment where he's not there, he's watching this all, running it through his head like a simulation and rushing fast through all possible universes. Then Troy says “Oh shit,” and kisses him so hard they both fall back against the floor and that's it.

All three of them are fanned out against the cushions and lit up blue and red from the flickering laptop screen, slick all over with sweat and come. The mess on Abed's belly could be his or Troy's or both, and he can still taste Annie on his mouth, a little sour and a little gross but still good in some carnal way. Troy's arm is a weight on his chest, his and Annie's twinned hands resting on her thigh, the shades of their skin all together intersecting but different enough to look interesting. When he looks at Annie she's blushing, all the way down to her chest which is still heaving softly to catch breath.

“That was…”

“ _Awesome,”_ Troy says, leaning up so he can look at both of them, exhausted and smiling stupidly, adorably. “That was like nine different fantasies at once. It was the Batman of sex, I love you guys.”

Annie's eyes are closed when he looks again. “I don't know what I think about myself after doing that.” She opens one eye. “But I'm glad I did.”

Abed draws the hand she was holding, the cleaner one, down her cheek. “And again?”

“Obviously.”

“Cool,” he says.

“Cool cool cool,” they both finish.

“That was cheesy.” He shakes his head at both of them, feeling around for the tissue box. “That's not making the edit.”

*

Abed wakes up sweating and dizzy and so relaxed he thinks maybe his spine has just totally melted into the big quilted pillow he stole from Annie's bedroom when he realises there's a person on either side of him. Troy has one leg thrown over his, pressed all against his spine in a familiar shape but the other one -

“Abed?” Annie’s left hand is wrapped all the way around his waist and she moves her head into the crook of his neck when she blinks up at him in the dark. “Go back to sleep, you can have your boxers back tomorrow, I'm not going back to my room all… exposed.”

She yawns a little bit like a cat and curls up tighter, eyes closing.

“Keep them,” he says. He likes the idea of sharing himself with them. He likes, more than that, the circular narrative. She's in his clothes, and Troy loves him. “So, about me filming you?”


End file.
